Current Conwy Research
Monitoring in the Conwy from Source to Sea
- Detecting environment change and identifying key processes of environmental change in terrestrial and freshwater habitats, including those at the interface with marine systems, using a combination of long-term monitoring, designed surveys and experiments (e.g. Countryside Survey, ECN, AWMN, EU projects).
- Quantifying carbon, nutrient and pollutant fluxes from terrestrial to freshwater and inter-tidal areas (e.g. CEH Carbon catchments)
Modelling and Experiments in the Conwy
- Long-term climate change experiments on peatlands to determine controls on soil carbon sequestration and feedbacks to the climate system.
- Developing response functions describing current invertebrate and plant biodiversity in terrestrial, freshwater and coastal environments in relation to key environmental variables/drivers to predict future changes in biodiversity.
- Up scaling from plot-scale and river-scale to landscape scale predictions by development of catchment-scale linked ecosystem models to predict changes in ecosystem services (e.g.EU Euro-limpacs project)
- Our work focuses on nutrient pollution and climate change in two key coastal habitats – saltmarsh and sand dunes.
- Impacts of atmospheric nitrogen deposition on stabilisation and species loss in sand dunes
- How changes in water table dynamics affect plant species composition
- Adaptive management options to mitigate adverse effects of large-scale environmental drivers such as climate change and nitrogen
- Impacts of flow, nutrients and contaminants on inter-tidal communities
- Options for adaptive management including managed retreat in response to increased storminess and sea level rise.
